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AUSTINWEEKLY news ■
Vol. 33 No. 36
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September 4, 2019
Serving the poor is getting to be a habit,
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austinweeklynews.com
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Also serving Garfield Park
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Austin A ti teen t namedd Cubs Scholar, page 11
A new front in homelessness just across the border Sojourner House, pioneering bridge housing on Austin Blvd., is first of its kind in suburban Cook County By LACEY SIKORA Wednesday Journal
Oak Park will soon make housing history with the opening of Sojourner House, the first dedicated bridge housing in suburban Cook County. Located on Austin Boulevard, Sojourner House contains five separate apartments as well as a detached coach house unit and will bridge the gap between homeless shelters and permanent housing for vulnerable men, women, and families facing homelessness. A combined effort of Maywood-based Housing Forward, Oak Park Housing Authority, MacNeal Hospital and Oak Park Residence Corporation, the house is designed to keep families together with short-term stable housing until they can find permanent housing; to serve as an alternative to PADS shelters for people requiring accessible accommodation and to provide temporary residence for people recovering from medical treatment. Lynda Schueler, executive director of Housing Forward, says that the need for such bridge housing is great and growing. She points out that 11 percent of PADS shelter clients are families and says that there has been an influx of families in shelters lately. Two of the six units at Sojourner House will be dedicated to families. Another need that Housing Forward and Loyola Medicine’s MacNeal Hospital have identified is See SOJOURNER HOUSE on page 8
SHANEL ROMAIN/Contributor
STEPPING IN: Patricia Rencher, of Austin, with a photo of her family. Rencher and her husband Ronnie are raising their four grandchildren. The couple was inducted into Senate Majority Leader Kimberly Lightford’s Grandparents Raising Grandchildren Hall of Fame in 2018.
The real unsung heroes? Grandparents raising grandkids
Inductees into Lightford’s Grandparents Raising Grandchildren Hall of Fame share stories of ‘forever love’ By MICHAEL ROMAIN Editor
Aleatra Jackson, 59, described with reverence the moment her grandson, Zion, 14, came into her home permanently. “He and his siblings were all sleeping on the floor,” Jackson recalled. “One of them woke him up and said, ‘Zion, your
grandmother’s here.’ He jumped off the floor. He was rubbing his eyes, because he was still half-sleep, and he said, ‘Can I live with you?’ “He stayed with me for the Christmas holiday and four days later, I get a call from the Rock Island police telling me his mother was incarcerated and they had taken the rest of the children. They asked if Zion could stay with me.”
Jackson said that her son, Zion’s father, was already incarcerated. She didn’t anticipate that her grandson’s mother would also end up in prison. “I just thought that maybe she would be in jail for a couple of days,” Jackson said. “I thought Zion would stay a couple of weeks. He’s been with me for almost 10
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See GRANDPARENTS on page 9
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